Scientific Interest
Before coming to Fermilab I worked on the ARGUS experiment at DESY, in Hamburg Germany, and the CLEO experiment at Cornell University. At both of these experiments, which
took place at electron-positron colliders, I did research into the
spectroscopy of charmed hadrons and into the weak decays of hadrons
containing b or c quarks. These experiments blazed the trail that lead
to the extensive program of CP violation and rare decay studies
performed by the BaBar and Belle experiments over the past decade.
I came to Fermilab in 1996 to continue this research at the FOCUS experiment, which was then just starting data taking, and at the BTeV experiment, which was early in its design phase. The FOCUS experiment
was highly succesful and is just now, in 2008, publishing its final
papers. The BTeV experiment held the promise of expanding the program
of CP violation studies and rare decay physics far beyond the reach of
previous experiments. In 2005, unfortunately, BTeV was cancelled by the
Department of Energy, just before the anticipated start of
construction.
I next worked on the development of improved beam
position monitors for the Tevatron and for the Main Injector.
These projects led to significant operational improvements of the
respective accelerators. Between 2006 and 2009 I collaborated on the
design of the SiD detector for the proposed International Linear Collider.
In September 2008 I turned my research interests towards a different
corner of high energy physics, the search for neutrinoless muon to
electron conversion in the field of an atomic nucleus. This experiment,
proposed by the Mu2e collaboration, was called out as a high priority by the 2007 P5 Panel and received Stage I approval from the Fermilab PAC in November 2008. Although this experiment uses relatively low energy
particle beams, its exquisite sensitivity to very, very rare processes
provides access to mass scales far beyond the reach of even the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The design of the Mu2e experiment starts from that of the MECO experiment, originally proposed for the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and will evolve over the coming years.
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